Seniors need better options, not just better standards

Re A call for national standards in long-term care, Dec. 10

Given the awful conditions in which seniors have lived in LTC homes, the call for national standards in institutionalized elder care is understandable. Accountability is a reasonable expectation from the provinces and territories now demanding more federal funding. And it would surely benefit seniors if institutionalized care were better monitored and enforced. However, is elder care best delivered in institutions? Are they the only choice when for-profit LTC homes pay hundreds of millions of dollars to shareholders? There will always be a need for critical care, but we must ask whether tax dollars would be better allocated to non-institutional solutions — like helping elders age at home, and offering them imaginative, community-based, assisted-living alternatives. Let’s have national standards. But let’s also fund inclusive models of elder care for those who have built our country and its social system.

Salvatore (Sal) Amenta, Stouffville